Avoid common mistakes in English 3: Coming and Going

When talking about their travels and commuting I often hear non-native speakers of English incorrectly use coming when they should be using going. So, which is the right one to use?

This is where it gets slightly complicated, because it depends on factors such as

The place you’re going to
Where you are
Whether the person you’re speaking to is already at that place (or likely to be there)

Basically

You go to see people
People come to see you

So, if you’ve failed to arrive at work one day the boss might call or text you (remember here the place where you work is often just referred to as “work”)

“Are you coming in to work today?” (the boss is at work so you are coming to them)
Or, maybe, you are making a call to explain the situation
“I’m really ill, I won’t be coming in to work today”
(the choice of coming or going is from the perspective of the person you’re talking to, in this case the person who you are talking to is/will be at work, this even applies if you are leaving a message on an answering machine or talking to someone who won’t be going in to work until later)

Suppose you are talking to your friend (who isn’t connected to your workplace)

“I’m not going in to work today”
(In this case you might consider going to see your friend and say to them: “I can come and see you instead”)

Finally, you may have heard a few expressions relation to coming and/or going

“I don’t know whether I’m coming or going”.
You would use this expression if you were confused and had too many things to think about. The idea being that a very confused person wouldn’t be able to decide if they weren’t coming or going.
“I can’t keep up with his comings and goings”
Here comings and goings means general movements and activities.

Hopefully, now that you’re armed with that information, you’ll be able to correctly tell people whether you’re coming or going.

American English

There are about four times as many speakers of American English as there are of British English. The differences between the two include vocabulary and idiomatic phrases but the most obvious and easily noticeable is probably in the accents. As a result of overwhelming numbers of American English speakers and the economical and political importance of the US, forms of English used in Britain, Australia, Canada etc. have become less distinct.
Historical background In the 17th century British people went to the US. They spoke a variety of different dialects but after they reached their destination, their language started to develop independently and began to have less and less to do with British English. A lot of new words were added to their vocabulary, often borrowed from Native Americans. Later on, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the language they spoke was affected by French and Dutch settlers along with various other immigrants coming to the US.
Dialects and regional differences The main differences between regional dialects are based on accent but also vocabulary used. General American English (GAE), derived from the Midland dialect group, it’s the dialect closest to standard, spoken widely in the Midwest but used in different parts of the country too. Similar but not quite the same, the Midwestern accent is common across the northern states. Northern dialects spread west from New York while New England has its own accent. The Bostonian accent is rather distinctive and spoken by rich families from the Boston area. The influence of Mexican Spanish on south-western dialects can be seen. African Americans still live in the US and their accent seems to have a lot in common with southern accents. I also found this video with an adorable British boy trying to put on American accent and it really made me laugh although he mostly tends to imitate southern accents more than anything else. These are most distinctive and often work as a stereotypical American accent. It is by no means a reliable sample of American English; however, it is really pretty funny and sweet how he tries to do it. I just love the way he says “squirrel” and “how are you doing?”!

Written American English
There is also a distinctive way in which Americans spell which British people seem to consider wrong. As long as they may accept –z- for –s- in words such as realise (realize) and –t for –d in past tense of certain verbs such as learned (learnt) they often frown upon –or- for –our e.g. colour (color), -x- for –ct- e.g. connection (connexion).There is a war over past participle of a verb ‘to get’. Americans say it’s gotten and British say it’s got. Also, American English seems to be much more direct and polite forms used commonly in British English, decorated with pleases and thank yous as well as polite questions such as would you mind if… are very unnatural to Americans. It is basically a very British phenomenon as these over-polite forms seem very fake for native Polish speakers as well.

Lingapps

I am not a professional but merely an iPad user who thought they could spare a few words about the apps I use and you can read more reviews if interested. I recommend all of these for language students and linguiphiles.

Mental Case Flashcards - £.79 / HD £2.99

Totally awesome and fun. It lets you create flashcards on your device. You can use it to learn practically anything – I use it for Spanish and English vocabulary. The brilliant thing about is that you can not only add pictures but also audio files. Some people remember things from seeing them, some from hearing so here’s the solution for both.

Accela Study Spanish | English  - £5.99

Another brilliant app based on flashcards and vocabulary learning. Depending on what version you want to get, prices vary - there are more languages available. Now, when getting one of the more pricey ones, consider whether you really will learn anything from it. I know a person who paid a lot of money for language learning apps and still can't really make any sense in their target language anyway. It is a nice supplement but not a substitute for the hard work that is studying!

Shakespeare - £0.00

Right, that’s the app that my literature lecturer recommended and that includes the complete works of Shakespeare. It comes with a brilliant glossary too. ‘’How cool’’ I thought, hurriedly downloaded it and have never used it since… That’s just me though. It would be perfect for Shakespeare lovers as well as literature students. There’s also Shakespeare Pro available, a paid app with additional features such as audio and so-called Shakespeare Passport – a virtual ticket to participating venues e.g. exhibitions.

Record - Voice Recorder - £1.19

Not professional but works brilliantly for me when recording lectures. The best part is probably the fact that you get to sync it so easily with your computer. It’s very easy to use too and does exactly what it says on the tin.

iStudiez Pro  £1.79

It lets you manage your timetable as well as keep track of your work and preparations for exams. Alarms and notifications come with it so that the app reminds you about your deadlines. Personally I don’t use it, as all of the above functions I find good enough in Google Calendar and a traditional paper one. It looks like a neat app though so might be worth trying if that’s your sort of thing. Alternatively have a go with its free counterpart - the Lite version.

Memeo Connect Reader - £0.00

This is fantastic. I love it! If you are a Google Docs user and have an iPad you know exactly how much of a pain it is to go to traditional Google Docs view in your Internet browser, right? Now, this app is beautiful and so neat! You can of course browse your files in offline mode too which is good news for somebody like me who spends a lot of time travelling and loves to keep productive on the go. I would honestly pay money for this app but guess what? It's free!

Scrabble –  iPhone £1.19/ iPad £3.99

We all know what this is. Try the Apple version and you will be stuck to your device. Believe me, everybody I've told about this app must have spent hours playing with it. It’s really fun, also when other people want to try a multiplayer option with you – pass and play/WiFi. The app is gorgeous as well and no tidying tiles is required! The terrible downside for me is that I got hopelessly addicted to it!

Miss Spell's Class– £0.00

Test your spelling abilities with some of the trickiest words in the English language. Decide quickly if the words you see are spelled correctly. Time is running! It’s a really cool app, brilliant for competitions with friends as Miss Spell gives you a grade after each go. 

Rhetorically Speaking 2: Alliteration

Alliteration is the use of the two or more words in sequence that have the same sound in their first syllables. Take this example

The snake silently slithered

Here the ess sound is repeated three times. The repetition of sounds is very pleasing the to the human ear and sentences using alliteration take on a poetry-like nature. Made-up names for cartoon characters and comic-strip heroes often feature alliteration,

Micky Mouse, Donald Duck, Dan Dare.

Then there are film and pop star names, characters in novels and fictional places,

Ronald Reagan, Janet Jackson, Peter Pan, Heartbreak Hotel

Overuse of alliteration can often become cliched. An example of this is in what we shall politely call the lower-quality press. Headlines like “Fox Found on 72nd Floor” (taken from today’s Sun) aren’t too bad, they just got lucky (and so did the fox). However, all too often, headline writers go out of their way to use alliteration and the results can sound contrived, such as this example which manages to pack two alliterations into one headline, “Can this cute cat secretly sense death?” (also from today’s Sun).

Summing up, use alliterations sparingly. Sometimes they will happen naturally. Don’t give in to the temptation of using words you wouldn’t normally use (or aren’t entirely sure of) just for the sake of alliteration. This, my dear readers, is why this article isn’t titled “Awesome and Awful Alliterations”. For once I am practicing what I’m preaching.

The True Meaning of Ignorance

My cliché-radar has been working overtime recently. There seems to be a real profileration of native English speakers who are misusing the word ignorance. I'm terribly sorry to inform you, but a person who does not reply hello to you is not being ignorant. You are being ignorant yourself, however, for not knowing how to use your own language. Although the person who is ignoring you might be ignorant about good manners, chances are they are simply being rude. The definition of the word ignorant is less informed or lacking in knowledge. We all exhibit a degree of ignorance in different areas - nobody knows everything, therefore calling someone ignorant is not even a proper insult, despite some people construing it as such.

Suppose I couldn't be bothered to speak to you because I don't like you/don't care about you - the silence is just my way of expressing get out of my face. This isn't ignorance at all, this is being honest. You turn round to somebody else and moan to them about how ignorant I am. It doesn't make you look very smart, does it? Before embarrasing yourself again please take my kind advice next time, make an extra-special effort by opening up your dictionary.

Michael Jackson stated in one of his interviews that people were ignorant if they had a problem with him sharing his bed with children. What information or knowledge were we lacking to understand his behaviour? What were we ignorant of? His famous misue of the word ignorant was subsequently spoofed by South Park.

Sometimes foreigners make the mistake of using ignorant as a noun. This is especially common for my fellow countrymen as ignorant is indeed a noun in Polish. Then again, in English, there is the noun ignoramus used to describe an extremely ignorant person.

To sum it up, be careful when using words you're not entirely sure about. There's a similar story with the word hypocrite, but I'll talk about it on another occasion. Take a second before you call someone ignorant and ask yourself this question: is there any specific knowledge they're lacking and therefore ignorant of?

Be Your Own Proofreader

A while back I was browsing the threads on my favourite internet forum. Some hapless fool had made the mistake of posting a thread advertising himself as a teacher of English. Needless to say, the post contained some mistakes, whether they were typos or not I can’t remember and this brought the usual guffaws from the forum regulars who have nothing better to do with their time. One of these guys posted this remark,

“Well, making those sort of mistakes won’t exactly install confidence in your pupils”

The phrase he was looking for was, of course, “instill confidence”. I discreetly PM’d the guy pointing out that he had used the wrong phrase so that he could nip in, make an edit and not make a fool of himself. Making mistakes in English when trying to ridicule someone is not a great strategy. I shouldn’t have bothered. The guy said that he was a proofreader and knew what he was talking about.

If I’d known about Brians' Errors at the time I could have pointed him in the direction of this page. Instead I told him to Google it (my apologies for using Google as a verb). Google is a very quick way of determining how popular a word is on web pages and hence in the real world. However, if you simply search Google for install confidence followed by instill confidence you might be fooled into thinking that installing confidence is a perfectly valid concept. The key here is to make sure that when searching Google for a phrase make sure you enclose the phrase in quotation marks, thus otherwise Google will search for the words in your phrase individually rather looking for the phrase as a whole.

Some people just don’t take criticism well, no matter how politely presented, and the guy refused point blank to believe that he could possibly wrong and said that he was too busy to argue the matter. Too busy badly proofreading texts in-between spouting nonsense on internet forums, no doubt.

These days there is an even better way of finding out how popular certain words and phrases are. Enter a word/phrase into Google’s Ngram Viewer and it searches its repository of over a million or so books and produces a nice graph of how often a word has been used in various books throughout the ages. You can even select which type of books you are searching from; “British English”, “American English”, “Fiction” etc. Fascinating stuff. For example, you can see that gaiety is steadily falling into disuse whereas facebook was non-existent before 1982.

We have online spell-checking these days and you can see errors underlined in red as you type. What you might not see underlined in red are the words that went astray when you rephrased your sentences. Reading your text out loud is a great way of finding errors. After you’ve finished reading it out loud pass it to a friend or colleague and get them to read it out loud too. Even then a few mistakes might slip through.

Remember to give criticism politely and accept it graciously. Acknowledge that there will always be people better educated than you (this might not apply to you Nobel Prize winners out there if you’re reading this). Also remember that just because something is in popular usage doesn’t mean it’s correct. Having said all that, hopefully there aren’t too many mistakes lurking in the articles I’ve written and if there are then I’m all too happy to have them pointed out to me. Now, I shall sit back and wait for the stream of emails to arrive...

The Importance of Spaces

You can’t see them, but you know they’re there. I’m talking about spaces. There are some pairs of words that can be used joined together as one word or kept separate with a space. The distinction can be very subtle or very marked. Here are some of the most common examples.


every day & everyday

I go to the gym every day
(Here every day is an adverb meaning on a daily basis).
I have a tuxedo for special events as well as my everyday suits for work
(Here everyday is an adjective that means ordinary, not special)
Going to the gym is an everyday occurence for me
(Here everyday is again used as an adjective, but this time literally meaning every day or pretty much every day anyway)

everyone & every one

Everyone deserves a treat now and again
(Everyone means all the people, everybody can often be substituted for everyone)
Make sure you check that every one of those envelopes has a signed cheque inside it
(We could have used all here, using the phrase every one emphasises that we definitely don’t want any missed out)

all together & altogether

I’m not altogether sure about the meaning of this word
(In this context altogether means completely or entirely, either of these words could be used instead)
I’ll do the presentation when we are all together in the same room
(All together means in the same place at the same time)

into/in to

Put the ice cream into the freezer
(Here into is used to emphasise the motion of putting something inside something else)
Governments rarely give in to ransom demands
Johnny handed his homework in to the teacher
(In these examples giving in and handing in are phrasal verbs so we need to put a space before to)

all right/alright

Alright is the less formal spelling of “all right” (more of a British-English thing)
How are you? I’m alright thanks (means I am ok, nothing much to complain about)
How was the film? It was alright (in this case it means passable, in the sense of it being average, nothing special)
Then there is the use of all right as two discrete words...
Make sure the figures are all right (i.e. correct) before you send the quotation to the customer.

all ready/already

I already ate (Already means you have done something, usually, but not always, in the recent past)
When you’re all ready I shall begin (Here all just means everyone present)

As is often the case in English if you’re not sure of something avoid using it. If a dictionary isn’t available for you to check something then you may well find a way of expressing what you want to say using words that you already know the meaning of.